


we'll meet again

by jm_serendipitous



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: BROT3, Friendship, M/M, Missing Scene, Pre-Slash, Stormpilot, implied-Kylo Ren/Rey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 17:33:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5506664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jm_serendipitous/pseuds/jm_serendipitous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poe and Rey haven't left Finn's side since they arrived back at Resistance's base, but now that the map to find Luke Skywalker is complete, Rey wants to go find him. Poe isn't too happy to hear her reason for going.</p><p>AKA, a missing scene before Rey said goodbye to Finn</p>
            </blockquote>





	we'll meet again

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in less than 36 hours, so please be kind

“You’ll look after him, right?”

Poe Dameron hasn’t left Finn’s side – and won’t, not unless at the request of General Organa – and has thus grown accustomed to sharing bedside vigil with this Rey, with this Jakku girl Finn found Han Solo with. 

And he likes her, weirdly enough. 

She’s a pilot like him, and when her incredulous at discovering Luke Skywalker the Myth is in fact Man spills out Poe does what he does second best: he talks. Reminisces about this tree Jedi Skywalker planted in his backyard on Yavin 4 and regales her with the stories his grandfather and parents built him on, the Battle of Endor and the Galactic Civil War, his mother the Green Squadron hero and his father the Pathfinder warrior.

Rey’s transfixed, enchanted by history, by this world she stumbled in to by accident, by sheer circumstance and coincidence. She begs to know more, all of it, everything with grins that don’t come down from her ears. 

He’s surprised, then, at the question. Even more so at the sight of a pack on Rey’s shoulder and a lightsaber on her hip. Sure he felt it, her dwindling dedication and wandering commitment, she who knew so much. She never outright said it, but there was something waiting for her – or something she waited for – and while once it was out of reach it was now nothing more than a stone’s throw away.

She dawdles in the doorway, shifting weight between her feet, hips tilting too. His gaze draws down to her hip. Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber. Once, maybe, Kylo Ren’s lightsaber. Kylo Ren who slashed and scorched and split Finn open. Kylo Ren who put Finn in this bed. 

Poe’s jaw tightens. Bowing her head, Rey fumbles her vest over the belt; the lightsaber vanishes from sight. “You’re leaving?” 

“Yes,” she says, emphasizes, “for a little while.”

“In what?” Poe hunts, threading a needle through the taters of his father’s jacket, stitching the singe as it lies across his lap. “Not that dumpy Falcon.” 

Rey nods. “I’ve accepted the offer Han Solo made to me prior to his death. I leave with Chewbacca in a few minutes. I just…” 

She looks so paltry in that moment, and Poe remembers with a start just how young she is, has forgotten what young looks like in war and most of all, outside of it. There’s capable and incompetent in war; no such thing as young and old. “I wanted to say goodbye, to you and to Finn.” 

“Where are you going?” he inquires.

Sitting back in his chair, he picks at the Rebel Alliance badge on the shoulder and watches Rey turn her gaze about the infirmary. She tracks the half dozen patients and as many medidroids and human nurses, doesn’t want to say it, not here, not in the range of so many open ears.

And Poe gets it, he does. How do you explain yourself sometimes? Explain instincts and intuition and whatever voice or force edging you along. Getting friends or family to understand it is trying enough, nevertheless a stranger. And he’s not one to intercede in others’ personal affairs.

But he’s not leaving Finn’s side and if Rey wants to then she better be brave enough to give an excuse.

“Where are you going?” he inquires again, gesturing to Finn, unconscious still, pliant and fallible and worrying everyone with more. “For when he wakes up and asks.”

“Poe,” Rey moans, shoulders dragging to the floor, “you heard Medical.” Yes, he had. Wishes he hadn’t overheard the nurses fear like infirmed from the neck down and hesitations like irreparable. Wishes General Organa hadn’t been as pessimistic about Finn’s coma as to pay a personal visit of condolence. “He might not—”

“What do I tell him when he wakes up?”

Rey curls a flyaway strand of dark hair behind her ear. Can’t look at Poe. Or, dare it, Finn.

“Now that the map’s complete, I’m going to find Luke Skywalker.”

Poe finds his feet beneath him, sputters, “Skywalker?” He rounds the bed, fingers grazing along the lines of the blanket; over Finn’s ankles and in the valley between, off the mattress and in front of Rey. 

She grows impossibly taller, tips her chin and makes her spine rigid. Her confidence mounts its peak, gifted the rare opportunity of catching him off guard. “Why?” he has to know. 

“So he can train me,” she explains quietly. Matter-of-factly. He heard the rumors, after all, gossip proven true from her own mouth. When she told him such a detail he joined a trusted circle of confidants, so small she counted the people on one hand, and he’s kept the secret close to his chest ever since. 

“If he trains me,” she continues, “I can learn the ways of the Force. I can control it and work alongside it. And then when I meet Kylo Ren again…”

“You’ll kill him?” Poe finishes, sets his hands on his hips and can’t help the hopeful lift.

“Kill him,” she agrees. 

She dodges out of the way of a passing nurse come to check Finn’s vitals, looks down, and Poe recognizes the twitch in her lip, the duck of her head. His grandfather did something of the same when his parents weren’t coming home just yet. Recently he’s seen it on General Organa, how she stares at a map or battle plan, looking but not there to see.

It’s something of a deliberating expression. When words are at a toss.

Rey’s earlier confidence is eviscerated. “Or bring him back.” 

“What?” Poe shakes his head, can’t have heard her right, not possible. He steps dangerously close to her. “You’re not serious.” 

“Poe—”

“He could’ve killed you. He almost killed Finn. He killed his father,” he spits out, seethes. “Have you forgotten all of that already?”

“Of course I haven’t forgotten,” Rey snaps. 

“Then why are you even entertaining an impossibility?” 

The nurse from before hushes them over her shoulder, harsh and loud but nowhere near as brutal as the blood-soaked bandage she’s peeled off Finn. Nowhere near as brutal as the festering laceration in Finn’s right shoulder, partially cauterized but still refusing to heal. Red dots permeate the sleeve of his white infirmary shirt where the wound bled through. 

Poe points at it. “Kylo Ren did that. A man like him isn’t worth saving.”

Rey swallows. “Maybe you’re right,” she admits. “Okay? Maybe you’re right and Kylo Ren isn’t worth the trouble. But he’s General Organa’s son and she explained everything to me. You wouldn’t at least try? For her?”

“No,” Poe answers swiftly. “Because he tortured me. Everything he pushed on me, I haven’t been able to get any of it out of my head. Good men are worth saving, no matter the trouble. Kylo Ren, Ben Solo, whoever you are trying to rationalize him as, he’s not a good man.”

“You didn’t see him. He hesitated before he killed Han. There’s something in there.” 

He laughs. It flows out of him in a breath. Warmth leaves his chest as well and as he tilts his head back, as he sucks in his bottom lip, a slight chill fills in the hole. He thought she was stronger than this. “He manipulated the situation to get what he wanted,” he tells her. “He’s still manipulating you. That’s what the First Order does. That’s what Siths do.”

The nurse shuffles on to her next patient, new bandage dressed to Finn’s shoulder. A small patch of red blooms at the bottom. Rey treads carefully forward, in the confidence of Poe’s ear. “You trusted Finn,” she says. “He was a Stormtrooper when you met him, right? But you trusted him.”

“What does Finn have to do with this?” 

“Why did you trust him?”

Poe shrugs helplessly. He certainly wasn’t expecting Finn. When a second Stormtrooper walked into his confinement he’d laughed at it, just another buckethead, just another number in a manufacturing line. 

But he went without protest or fight, didn’t he? He got in the TIE fighter and trusted this stranger to shoot at his enemy and not the back of his skull, didn’t he?

He can’t say definitely what made him follow Finn. To Rey he says, “Honestly? I don’t know. I just did.”

Rey nods. “I can’t explain why I have this feeling about Kylo like you can’t explain why you trusted Finn. I don’t want to feel this way. I want to hate him and I’m probably ignoring the part of me that does. But Poe,”—she takes his hands, and they’re cold and callused and have seen as much dirt and oil and grime as his own—“I’m more powerful than he is. I’m strong enough to do this.”

“Hubris will get you killed every time.”

“If I die killing him or saving him then so be it.”

Another laugh coughs out, as breathy as the first. “Just what we need: more martyrs.” He sobers, squeezes her hands where they’ve fallen between them. They swing there, to and fro. “I can’t sway you, can I?” 

Rey shakes her head, and his heart drowns a little. He barely got to know her, the days too short and too few, and while a quest for Luke Skywalker isn’t a signature on her death warrant, who she’ll be when she finds Kylo Ren and completes this mission she’s assigned herself will be like touching the grim reaper. 

She’ll lose her shine.

“Then I can’t help you,” Poe says and pulls away.

She starts, grasps his arm before it slips completely from her. “No. I need your help. I need you to do something for me. I need you to promise me something before I go.” She glances at Finn and her nails pierce Poe’s arm. “Don’t let him come after me. Keep him here. Please,” she begs of him.

“Rey,” he sighs, slithering his arm from her hold.

“You want to keep him safe, right?”

“That’s not fair.”

“None of this is fair,” Rey rasps. “But it’s what’s real. It’s our lives. I know you care about him. God, you might even care about him more than I do. Why else would you have given him your last name on his medical forms?”

(Finn Dameron. Yes, Poe did that. He liked the ring of it. Wanted Finn to wake up knowing he had a place in the galaxy and a name for the galaxy to know and remember. And that he had a family, if he wanted it.)

Poe perches on the bed and crosses his arms. Kicks at a gram of dirt on the floor. “I hate this,” he confesses, brusque and thick in his throat. “I hate you going on a mission and me waiting here. I hate waiting at all.”

She promises to return. Her hand slides down his arm as she slips past him to the other side of the bed and his gaze follows. He cranes his neck over his shoulder and watches as she kneels down, right to her knees, right at Finn’s level – Poe thinks for the first time.

(She’s godlier than any of them now. More divine, more powerful, lethal in all the right hands.)

“We’ll see each other again,” she whispers to Finn. “I believe that.” She kisses him between the eyes, chapped lips scratching his smooth, unblemished skin. And Poe wonders how that’ll change before she comes back. In Poe’s ear, “Thank you, my friend.” 

Like the Jakku winds she swept in on, she’s gone. Poe doesn’t watch her this time, closes his eyes and listens to her footsteps until they fade out the room and down the hall. 

He understands her want to find Luke Skywalker, wants to as well, volunteered to retrieve the last puzzle piece from Lor San Tekka, after all. And training to be a Jedi… Poe can’t wrap his head around that one quite yet, memories of once and before, what it’d mean. 

But will Finn resent him for not stopping her? Trying won’t matter, he has a feeling, and it sinks in his chest that Finn may tag him with that anyway, until she comes back, until he sees for himself that she’s alive and made it.

You can’t stop a woman hell bent on something, but…

Poe chases after Rey at the last minute. Too late, it proves, the last sight of her and the Millennium Falcon warping into the sky muddled by the blinding sun. The sun: still going, still bright. Like he hopes Rey returns still as.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on Tumblr [here](http://serendipitous--.tumblr.com/)


End file.
